Municipal Governments: Can You Spare a Dollar?

Two municipal governments made news yesterday by announcing drastic steps because of their inability to deal with their ever-mounting debts.

 San Bernardino California became the latest American city to declare bankruptcy. Meanwhile the mayor in Scranton Pennsylvania has defied a court order and vowed that all municipal employees will have their pay slashed down to minimum wage.

 The political elites may not dare to admit this publicly, but these dramatic actions are a continuation of the 2008 financial crisis.

The 2008 financial crises has proven unique because it has struck in various waves. The original wave revolved around the banking and financial sectors. This crisis then extended itself over the housing market, and has now spread to municipal governments.

 These crises are bound together by the commonality of a lack of capital.

The banks couldn’t weather the financial crisis because they didn’t have enough capital and needed bailouts, homeowners were underwater when mortgage rates adjusted because they didn’t have the income to make the adjusted pavement, and now governments made these big promises to employees when everything was good, but find themselves into draconian cuts because the good times died.

Yet neither presidential candidate would dare to admit that the 2008 financial crises is still going on because they want to talk about recoveries or what we need to do to speed up said recovery.

 I don’t know how were supposed to recover when we have unusually high foreclosure rates and municipal governments are slipping further into the toilet.

Perhaps Obama and Romney should focus less on this dubious recovery thing and focus more on how they propose to get us out of this great four year financial crisis.

For Life, Liberty, and Failed States

Foreign Policy Magazine in conjunction with the Fund for Peace has released the 2012 Failed States Index.

 This information is typically useful for scholars of terrorism because failed states can be fertile recruiting grounds for terrorist organizations like Al Qaeda.

Others use the index as a rallying cry to pressure their governments to do something about the abject human misery that is spawned by malfunctioning and broken states.

This years list is headlined by

·         Somalia

·         The Democratic Republic of Congo

·         North Sudan

·         South Sudan (NOT RATED)

·         Chad

·         Zimbabwe

My larger point in writing this blog is to question whether we should even be ranking failed states at all.

 The notion of ranking failed states does seem quite subjective and heavy handed. It makes it sound like the problems in Zimbabwe are somehow worse than that of Afghanistan and Haiti, who finished sixth and seventh respectively.

I venture to say that the average Afghan or Haitian would find common cause with Zimbabwean.

Further, state failure in my view, cannot be measured through some magical set of calculations and reduced to a numerical value.

There are people on the end of these numbers who are suffering from everything from autocratic governance to little affordable food and water.

 Many suffer from several ailments. I think this index would be more helpful, if it came with explanatory country by country data that explained the numbers.

Mexico: Return of the PRI

Mexico’s Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI) ruled Mexico for seventy-one years until they were voted out of office in 2000, accused of large scale corruption.

Twelve years later, the PRI is back in power after a victory by Enrique Pena Nieto in last Sunday’s presidential election. So what has changed?

The Mexican people have had twelve years of governance by the National Action Party (PAN). In those twelve years, Mexico has been caught in the grasp of an increasingly aggressive insurgency launched by drug cartels that the central government has failed in its’ efforts to defeat.

While there is unease at voting the party who ruled Mexico as a dictatorship for seventy years back into power, the PRI party has shown an unquestioned ability to govern.

The logical Mexican voter probably reasons “When the PRI was in power, I didn’t have to worry so much about being gunned down by a drug cartel.

I’m not sure that the PRI will be able to repeat its’ past success in the face of an increasingly aggressive drug cartel, but it will be interesting to see how the PRI deals with the drug cartels south of the border.

Mexico’s Drug-Free Election

The Mexican presidential election last Sunday passed largely without the violent influence of any of Mexico’s numerous drug cartels.

While some analysts have questioned whether the return of the PRI party to the presidency could mean a decrease in drug cartel violence. I think such thinking is rather shallow and simplistic.

Drug cartels have shown an amazingly perverse ability to adapt and invent new ways to conduct their trade, regardless of what the Mexican government has thrown into the countries war on drugs.

Why should we believe that people who were ingenious enough to have thousands of miles of underground tunnels constructed that led into the United States are suddenly going to be scared off by an acronym?

The more likely explanation was that Mexico’s drug cartels were acting strategically. Mexico’s drug cartels already had a sizeable hand in deciding this election.

 Previous administrations were judged for better or worse, by their failures in stemming the tide of drug related violence without Mexico. That failure plus the sluggish economy was more than enough to doom the incumbent party.

By not acting, the drug cartels were merely playing a waiting game that is likely to end with a violent crescendo.

Random Thought of Week

·         Sometimes you have to take a minute and be thankful for what you have instead of constantly shooting for something bigger.

Rockford Police: Go West Collect $100?

I rarely talk about my hometown on the blog, but the negotiations occurring between the police union and the city of Rockford have compelled me to post this blog.

The city of Rockford is considering implementing a geo-policing model where instead of one centralized police station, there will be several spread throughout the city.

The police union argues that there are not enough officers to cover the switch to a geo-policing model. Most controversially, the police union is requesting $100 dollars in hazard pay for working on the west side of the city, a higher crime area.

Rockford has a lengthy history of racial tensions, including a discrimination lawsuit, and a series of police shootings where white officers shot black suspects. Having hazard pay for officers who work the west side—where the majority of African Americans live is not going to help matters.

While I agree that the department is under-staffed, I’m insulted by the notion of hazard pay for officers just because the area they work has more crime.

I live on the west side of Rockford 24-7 and nobody offers me money for living there. If I made such a demand, people would think I suffered a blow to the head.

Police officers swore to protect the citizens of Rockford regardless of geography or skin color.

I suggest they focus on the very real issue of staffing within the ranks of the police force, rather than hazard pay for their undersized department.

The Neighborhood Drone

Given the success of drone strikes against Al Qaeda operatives in Pakistan and Yeman among other places, apparently the government may be looking to deploy similar technology throughout Main Street America.

Although the thought of the neighborhood drug house being obliterated by a thousand plus pound smart bomb holds a certain appeal, these would be drones of a surveillance variety that could perhaps be a tool of local law enforcement officials, who are being stretched pretty thin with the rising crime rate and mediocre economy.

There is a question of privacy vs. the benefits drones could provide to a beleaguered law enforcement community.

We live in a society where our privacy is being increasingly infringed upon with the increasing prevalence of the cyber world. But on the other hand, there’s an increasing crime wave in America’s inner cities that an increasingly stressed police force is struggling to combat.

While I’m sensitive to the plight of law enforcement, I don’t personally want a governmental entity taking an even bigger bite out of my privacy.